President Barack Obama has taken an interest in safeguarding nuclear materials since at least his first year in the Senate. Obama's first foreign travel as a U.S. senator was with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in August 2005, when the two men visited nuclear weapons storage and dismantlement facilities in Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

The next spring, Lugar and Obama authored a Senate bill authorizing a program to provide assistance to foreign countries to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The bill's provisions were incorporated into a House bill that passed later that year. It was signed in January 2007.

The Lugar-Obama initiative is modeled after a 1991 bill authored by Lugar and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. The Nunn-Lugar program provided U.S. funding and expertise to the former Soviet Union to dismantle stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
 
During the presidential campaign, Obama promised to "lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years -- the most effective way to prevent terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb." Obama said he would "fully implement the Lugar-Obama legislation to help our allies detect and stop the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction."
 
That effort is proceeding. According to a tally kept by Lugar's office, 81 percent of the 2012 goal for deactivating warheads has been met. Several other goals for dismantlement range from 50 percent to 100 percent completed, according to Lugar's office.
 
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has done several things to try to push these percentages higher.
 
At a July summit of the G-8 industrialized nations in L'Aquila, Italy, the leaders endorsed Obama's strategy for addressing the international nuclear threat, including an effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials within four years, break up black markets, detect and intercept materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt illicit trade in nuclear materials. Also in L"Aquila, Obama formally announced a plan to host a Global Nuclear Security Summit in March 2010.
 
Then, in September, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Security Council Resolution 1887, which among other things supported "better security for nuclear weapons materials," including "locking down vulnerable nuclear weapons materials in four years ... minimizing the civil use of highly enriched uranium to the extent feasible, and encouraging the sharing of best practices as a practical way to strengthen nuclear security."
 
Multilateral agreements on a sensitive issue such as control of nuclear materials are inevitably difficult to manage, but the administration appears to be making advancement of this promise a high diplomatic priority. We rate this promise as In the Works.